Author and personal development guru Jim Rohn once said, “You cannot change your destination overnight, but you can change your direction overnight.” I love that quote because it contains an important message regarding one of the most difficult things humans attempt to do: change. As Rohn so accurately suggests, even though change doesn’t happen immediately, you can start the ball rolling with your next thought.

The reason creating change is so difficult is that there’s a part of our personality that aggressively resists it at every turn. I’m sure that each of you can bear witness to the powerful mental push-back that always accompanies change. For example, I see this constantly in the arena of weight loss, where I spend most of my professional life working. People want desperately to lose weight by changing the way they eat, but most typically fail because of the strong emotional and psychological resistance that they always encounter when trying to enact that change.

I bet there’s something important in your life that needs to change if you’re to find the health, happiness and satisfaction you desire. In order for you to create that change, however, you must download some new programming into your mental computer. As I always say to those who seek weight loss: You can’t change your weight until you change your mind!

Since it’s your thinking that drives your behavior, all change begins with your thoughts. After all, what you do is a direct result of what you think. If you accept the analogy that your life is like a business, enacting change requires that you run your life differently by putting your mind under new management. This is the key to creating change in your life and giving you a real opportunity to reach your goals.

There’s a term used in the business world for a person who’s designated for the specific task of bringing about change. They call this person a change agent. Sometimes the change agent is a current employee who’s charged with the task and sometimes it’s a consultant from outside the company who’s brought in to do the job. Either way, the mission is to shake things up and create positive change by making the company more profitable, efficient or functional.

A change agent is a catalyst for transformation because they’re the people who make things happen. You might say they put their money where their mouth is. With that said, I suggest you take on the mindset of a change agent and start shaking things up for the better. Just as a change agent must have a strategy for transforming behavior in a business setting, so must you in your life.

What follows is a simple formula for making that happen. First, begin by identifying one thing in your life that you wish to change, and then follow these 5 simple steps:

Clearly describe the goal you want to achieve.

Break that goal down into 5 progressive and workable steps.

Clearly define the specific actions needed to accomplish each of those 5 steps.

Create a time frame for implementing and completing those 5 steps.

Take on the mindset of the change agent, who’s charged with managing and supervising this project, and make it happen.

It takes time, determination and action to create change because, as I mentioned earlier, it doesn’t happen overnight in one fell swoop. It reminds me of that old Aesop's fable about the race between the tortoise and the hare. As you remember, the moral of that story was that slow and steady wins the race. The same is true for change. Change happens slowly in a structured, measured and cumulative fashion.